As television (TV) viewers become more familiar with on-line services, such as the internet and the World Wide Web, they are demanding access to on-line information and content related to the TV content and TV-advertised companies and products. This information is becoming more readily available to the internet user. An increasing number of TV broadcasters, advertisers, and organizations have created their own internet locations (i.e., websites), and many have begun to display their web site address, (i.e., their Universal Resource Locator (URL) on TV ads and programs (broadcast events) to encourage viewers to access their website for more information. However, viewers typically cannot easily recall or identify an associated URL for a particular broadcast event because the broadcast URLs are typically displayed on TV for only a brief time and, in many cases, the relevant URL is not broadcast at all. A tool is needed to allow the viewer to easily access URLs, to immediately navigate to the desired URL, i.e., switch to the displayed website as if it were a TV channel, or to "bookmark" the broadcast event, i.e., to mark one or more broadcast TV events so the viewer can later recall these events and access all the websites associated with these events.
Familiar to most people, traditional bookmarks are those used to mark a page in a book to which the reader wants to later return. In the personal computer and World Wide Web environment, an analogous feature allows a typical net browser application running on the computer to "bookmark" web pages, i.e., select a button from a pull-down menu on the browser tool, allowing the user to store a URL associated with a website for rapid, one-step return access, without requiring the user to recall or re-enter the URL of that particular website. However, because there is no similar "bookmarking" tool that exists for viewers to use with their TVs, there is a resulting need for a user-friendly, automated system to "bookmark" TV broadcast events and the URLs associated with these events for subsequent viewer use. Additionally, once the events are bookmarked, it is also desirable to provide a system for viewers to easily retrieve and display the websites and website "hotlinks" (i.e., buttons programmed in hypertext markup language displayed on the internet that connect directly to specific websites) associated with these bookmarked events.